Email providers have always included guidelines for senders to help ensure your emails are delivered as expected, and to prevent rate limiting, marking emails as spam or blocking emails.
Both Gmail and Yahoo have recently announced that, coming in 2024, there will be new authentication requirements for bulk message senders, which may impact your delivery to any of your customers on those domains.
These are in addition to the general sender requirements that are outlined for anyone emailing a Gmail or Yahoo email address, whether on an individual or bulk basis.
What are the changes?
Starting in February 2024, both Gmail and Yahoo will require the following of all bulk senders:
- Set up SPF and DKIM email authentication for your domain.
- Set up DMARC email authentication for your sending domain.
- Bulk messages must support single-click unsubscribe, with a clearly visible unsubscribe link in the message body.
This is in addition to the other sender requirements that are already in place, such as:
- Message format adhering to RFC 5322 standard.
- Spam rate of 0.3% or lower.
- Email sending domains and IP addresses have valid PTR records.
- Gmail or Yahoo are not impersonated in the From: headers
If you’d like a deeper dive, here are Gmail’s sender guidelines and Yahoo’s Best Practices.
Why are things changing?
These new authentication requirements are aimed at reducing email fraud and spam, which is why the big focus is on DMARC. DMARC protects your domain against phishing, spoofing, and other email-based attacks. By implementing DMARC, you’re showing these providers that your email domain is safe to receive from, and gives the receiving servers instructions on what to do with misaligned emails.
How TouchBasePro can help
We’re here to ensure that your email gets to as many inboxes as possible, and to do that we have the tools you need to align with good sending practices and protect your domain. With these new requirements, we can help you:
- Understand email authentication and DMARC policies
- Set up DMARC, SPF, and DKIM
- Monitor your authentication results and deliverability
Even if you already have authentication set up in the form of SPF, DKIM and DMARC, we can help you verify that your settings are configured correctly.
Fill in your details here and we’ll get you started on the road to full authentication.